My Conference Calendar

18 Years of Brain Mush

18 Years of Brain Mush

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Lots of healthy discussion …

Lots of healthy discussion at discuss.userland.com about Dave Winer’s comments about my Open Source conference report. Be sure to read the whole thread. There are plenty of valid points made by people from different persectives and points of view. In short, form your own opinion and don’t let someone else decide it for you.

So the conference is over. Today I go back to San Francisco for a day of work, then to a get-toether for a bunch of ex-Borders.com folks, then on Saturday to WebZine2000 where I’m sure I’ll meet even more people. Expect a report on this as well.

The one underlying theme I noticed at the OSS conference was the fact that open source software development is alive and well. There is certainly no shortage of developers with ideas, business people with plans, and venture capitalists with funding to take some of these initiatives to the next level. Lots of big companies sent representatives to scope out the world of OSS. I saw people from Amazon, Sun, HP, IBM, Intel, Dell, and many more. I also saw people from companies made up of a couple of guys in a garage with nothing but an idea. The massive amounts of useless swag was noticably absent, but of the swag I did see and collect most of it was pretty good. The O’Reilly miniature etch-a-sketches and beer coasters are the best.

Open source software has proven that it can be the best of breed in pretty much any market it moves into, and I think we’ll see that this is true as more and more OSS projects come into fruition; mainly Jabber, Mozilla, and XML-RPC. This can only be a good thing for the end user, the average computer user, and yes even the power-user developer.

The most surprising thing of all though, was the number of developers I saw with Apple Powerbooks. People often don’t associate Mac users as being developers or programmers, yet their numbers at this conference despite it being exactly the same week as MacWorld tells me that they are still around (Not everyone has migrated to Linux and/or Windows). The Mac users I did talk to all said basically the same thing: Powerbooks have the best hardware, period. Almost all of them said they were Linux users as well.

What’s with the spam influx lately? I’m noticing a substantial increase. Is it because everyone is at conferences this weeKk?